The best thing you haven't read yet

Arriving in Seattle

When we got off the plane in Seattle, I was a bit wrecked. I’d maybe had three hours sleep, and I was tired, confused and deaf in my right ear. And we were two hours late. On the positive side, I’d watched lots of movies. On the negative, one of those was Draft Day, an execrable Kevin Costner film about the NFL. Nothing is ever purely good or bad.
The immigration checks at Seattle have been upgraded. Now, instead of a grumpy man in uniform, a computer checks your passport and sends you on your way. Much simpler, even if we did mislay out passports at the bottom if my bag and spend five minutes panicking before we could find them. I filled in the details on my passport, the machine photographed each of us and then we took this to a man in uniform, who checked the photo just taken of me matched my appearance, and then we went downstairs and waited half an hour for our bags to appear.

All that done, we got out and got into Seattle nice and quickly. In the afternoon, my wife went to get her hair cut and I went into Ballard with Rob, one third of the house we’re staying with, and La Serpiente Aquatica Negra.

We walked about fifteen blocks to get to a pizza restaurant. Like an idiot, I didn’t wrap my daughter up against the cold, so she remonstrated with me all the way there, then fell asleep on me, and refused all attempts to unload her. So I had to eat lunch one handed, as everyone in Ballard walked past and peered through the window at us. The pizza was deep dish, which is best understood as being like a quiche with a filling made entirely from tomatoes and mozzarella – good, but heavy as a black hole. Afterwards, we wrapped my daughter in sweater and coat and rushed the fifteen blocks home as fast as possible. Sleep wasn’t long in coming.

This morning we woke up early, had breakfast, then had more breakfast, then had more breakfast, then went to a Thanksgiving meal. La Serpiente Aquatica Negra got to play with other toddlers (by “play” of course I mean “take their toys away from them by force”) but she was reasonably well behaved, especially when I put her into a little car and pushed her at speed around the house.

We came home, my daughter almost pulled a very heavy mirror down on her head, then she went to sleep, to dream of further destruction. Another day done, jet lag almost obliterated.